Better in Colour

Teigh is one of the ‘Thankful Villages’ identified by the writer Arthur Mee after the Great War. They lost no one who went to fight. There’s a memorial to those lucky men near the church. Teigh wasn’t a big place even then, and is smaller now, but even so, there were only fifty-two other villages in England and Wales who shared their good fortune. In Northamptonshire the only other examples are East Carlton and Woodend, also both tiny.

I leave the car by Holy Trinity and walk up the road to Edmondthorpe. To my great joy I find the church of St. Michael’s open: it’s in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust. Almost disbelievingly I move the door on its hinges and thank God out loud that I can step into a place of worship for the first time after four and a half months and bless the few people who live in the village. True, there’s red and white tape to stop me getting into the chancel, but that’s because damage was done during a winter storm: it’s still drying out. I wander around, looking at the graceful three-tiered monument to Sir Roger Smith and his family, wondering at its dating of 1655 – but maybe this was a remote place back then, and perhaps such elaborations went unremarked by Cromwell’s zealots. I look up at the armorial by the south door, which carries the legend ‘Resurgam’ (‘I will rise’), and allow myself some hope for the Church’s future.

 

St. Michael's Edmondthorpe

Any pilgrimage is unpredictable. You might find faith, or lose it. You may end up reaching the destination you imagined, or blisters may require an entirely different one. In 2016 I started with the premise that for Anglicans as with Britain we’d be ‘Better Together’, and I still think that’s true and advisable, but here we are four years on, and for me the emphasis is changing a little. To that original strapline I now add ‘Better in Colour’.

One can sense an argument brewing. There will be those who say with some justification that the heart of the Christian faith is the Word. Nothing else matters. If we can read the Bible, and pray, and be preached to, what more do we need? The new situation is a good thing: it’s taking us ‘back to basics’, isn’t it?

But by its nature prayer’s hard work for most of us, and the more inwardly focused and individual, the harder it is. Scripture is puzzling, and apparently contradictory: we all pick on the bits we like, and gloss the rest. And preaching is arguably an anachronistic medium, and there are few good exponents, and far fewer than many preachers think there are.

So the obvious solution now is to go – and remain - online, isn’t it?  Except that making good television is an art, and as I’ve said before, even to make brilliant lo-fi telly takes exceptional talent and a good eye, and a lot of on-line ‘influencers’ are just sad. Who wants to look up someone else’s nostrils as they mutter platitudes about faith or anything else?  Newcomer enthusiasts including Christians can be tempted to think that while the professionals wear nice clothes and make-up, they can get away with a scruffy jumper, old jeans, and a five o’clock shadow for their televisual input.  Any recorded medium shows up inadequacies which aren’t so obvious live. For example, the technology is there for musical artists to tour by YouTube. Simply hire a studio, target a particular town, and charge for the virtual experience. But it’ll only work if you can really  play or really sing, because your faults are going to show horribly in such an exposed environment. Goodness knows, not all Glastonbury ‘highlights’ of yesteryear stand up to scrutiny when re-shown.

We Anglicans are in danger of returning to a grey, controlled and controlling Calvinism, nothing to engage the senses, no art, no music, no humour, no participative liturgy, no eucharist, no feel for the beauty of language, no church building, no appropriate dress, because only ‘truth’ matters, and in the minds of some, no lens other than their own and certainly no metaphor, can convey that truth.

So, here’s my new pitch. God gave us so many marvellous gifts and talents, and Jesus spoke of life in abundance, so for me, not to use everything at our disposal to praise God, and to attempt to understand what we’re supposed to be doing down here on Earth, is missing the point. Just because we’re struggling to find ways to express our faith and love at the moment, we shouldn’t allow ourselves to slip into contempt for what we did before, or allow room for the insidious suggestion that the use of beautiful music or art as aids to worship was really just idolatry. These things can become so, but just because there’s a statue of the Virgin in your church, it doesn’t mean the congregation has taken its eyes off Jesus and is worshipping the statue instead. Not even Luther thought that, though Zwingli might have done.

The conversation should be about possibility and creativity, and not about technologically up to date ways of being dull.

Black and white photography was once all there was, and it did the job, sometimes brilliantly, until colour came along. Now there’s a choice, and if people with a great eye sometimes use b&w they do it for a reason or an effect, not because they have to. There’s nothing innately virtuous about the one thing rather than the other.

And let’s not kid ourselves that the new media may protect us from heresy, or somehow reset the dials on a faith that was in danger of going off the rails up until last New Year. American experience with faith mediated through television should alert us to the fact that exactly the opposite is true. The world on-line is wild and often wicked. Cultishness breeds there, and those viruses are no easier to eradicate than Covid. It is also by its nature excluding ( ‘I like my music…’: ‘See it your way’), whereas Anglicans and indeed all Christians are called to be inclusive and to draw attention to the universal. The medium is indeed the message, and so we have to learn to subvert the medium, or even avoid it, if it’s becoming counter-productive. Each parish has to find its own ways of maintaining its faith in the fresh air, while keeping a foot in the TV studio. Don’t let them tell you you’re a Luddite or a technophobe, Pike. It’s about asking the question: ‘What’s the appropriate technology here?’

I move on over the fields and further up the road to Wymondham, and I’m in Leicestershire now, but Rutland manners persist. At the little crossroads, the Rutland Flyer bus gives way to a family group of horse-riders who walk on over to the bridleway in stately fashion. Polite waves and declinations of the head all round. I follow the lane round to St. Peter’s church past a single pretty cow and its even more winsome (week old?) calf. As I sit in the porch I think with love and regret of a past Rector of our own church whose family life became complicated and was brought to the salivating attention of the national press, who then vastly compounded the distress and damage. As he moved away, there was a vacancy in the parish, the first of three I’ve lived through. They can be times of growth or enfeeblement, and the current environment will make life difficult for good decision-making and process.

You’d think Stilton Cheese originated in Stilton, wouldn’t you? But no, it started in Wymondham with a cheese-maker called Frances Pawlett in the eighteenth century and continued to be made here until the Second War. Frances sold her product on to a gent called Cooper Thornhill who kept an inn on the Great North Road at Stilton, and that’s how the cheese got its name. Frances became a wealthy woman from her endeavours.

I wander back to the other end of Edmondthorpe, beyond the Hall, and pick up a long south-easterly trending path which has the tower of SS Peter & Paul in Market Overton in its sights. From the name of the village I know it will be sizeable, or else it wouldn’t have had a market, and that it’ll be atop a hill (or it wouldn’t be ‘Over’).

If your search engine is anything like mine, it’ll show Market Overton’s  Free Church as the first reference if you put in the village name plus ‘church’. How do we feel about competition between churches? Jean Reid was a good colleague when I helped run a recording studio as part of a conglomerate of small media businesses. She once said to me (I was in a worried frame of mind…) that there was enough business to go round. All that was necessary was to do a good job, and the order books would look after themselves. I’ve returned to that advice frequently over the subsequent thirty-five years, but I still question how it looks to the wider world. Is it simply what the public expects – that there should be a plethora of churches to choose from? Or does it undermine our claims? In visiting Rock Hill in South Carolina a few years ago, I remember arriving at the Episcopal church early on a Sunday morning, to hear the worship band in the black Pentecostal church across the road thundering away. It felt competitive, but of course it also represented a societal racial divide with long historical roots in the South. There was ‘choice’, strictly speaking, but there was also peer group and community pressure.

 

Where?

I make two diversions. The first is a slog up a busy road to Thistleton, whose settlement is rather isolated as far as paths and tracks are concerned because of the sizeable gorilla presence of RAF Cottesmore. The church of St. Nicholas is swathed in scaffolding. I sit on a wall next to its stiffly constructed apse and ponder. The line of the road to the south, which actually is bisected by the one-time airfield, and its OS naming to the north as ‘Fosse Lane’ makes me think the Romans woz ‘ere. I pick up Fosse Lane heading for the ‘Thistleton Gap’ which pretty much marks the boundary between Rutland, Leicestershire and Lincolnshire (Thistleton and Market Overton are Rutland’s most northerly settlements). In 1811 a crowd of 20,000 turned up at the Thistleton Gap to see the national heavyweight title contested between Tom Cribb and American Tom Molineaux. According to Wikipedia the venue had the advantage of allowing the crowds to disperse quickly and easily in the event of the rozzers turning up – the fight was illegal. Cribb won.

Back in Market Overton after a long energy-sapping tramp over tufty grass along dangerously corrugated tracks – easy to break an ankle here, even with boots, I make a second deviation on my way back to Teigh via the hamlet of Barrow. You can guess how it got its name. The chapel of ease which once sat here is gone now, but it was built close to the site of the burial mound which must be there somewhere behind the farms, though I can’t see it. As always, I’m moved and comforted by the knowledge of faith’s continuity while there are people to have it. I can rant in these pages for all I’m worth, but whatever will be, will be, and doubtless those who come after us will pose the same questions we do, and will leave marks on the landscape to show their beliefs in ways similar to those we have left. Which doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility to be the very best we can.

Pigs in a poke:  22 km. 6 hrs. 4 stiles. 12 gates. 7 bridges. Sun, occasional cloud, and a lively breeze.

Seen in St. Michael’s Edmondthorpe:

Defeated?

A sonnet to empty churches:

Come on. You lot have survived worse things;

Black Death, Plague and two World Wars

The Reformation (Cromwell clipped the wings

Of angels in the roof); and there are scars

On ancient faces, marble noses cropped

And poppy heads beheaded like the King;

And modern vandals too. But you’ve not stopped

Your ageless plain ability to sing

Of something quite indifferent to the now;

Built with a trusting love and potent faith

You stand there still in testament to how

Beauty is not a wafted, fleeting wraith,

A ghost which chance can whimsically destroy;

You can be filled, if not by faith, with joy.

                                    Anon.

                                    June 2020